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I. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Background
Agriculture, being the most primitive profession of the civilized society, draws much on its development starting from shifting cultivation to advanced
precision farming. With the advancement in the civilization, people came to know about more crops and started to cultivate many crops. Population increase
and advancement in the civilization made man to settle at one place and to cultivate the same area year after year. Now, agriculture became a profession is
given the name commercial agriculture, and precision agriculture and sustainable agriculture as being the part of it.
Nowadays, the population of the world is growing dramatically. In order to meet the increasing demand for food, the farming communities have to produce
more and more their agricultural yields to meet the food demand. Under present situations, where the land is a limiting factor, it is impossible to bring more area
under cultivation extensive farming, so farming community should tackle this challenge of producing more and more food with the existing available land
intensive farming. The importance of land as a resource cannot be overemphasized. Land
issues have become a concern not only locally or nationally but also globally. There are several agenda of international conferences and treatises that have
placed land at the center of development issues. They have underscored the fact that land issues are tied to combating poverty, protecting the environment,
2 promoting food security, advancing social equity and improving economic
growth. However, latter the current technologies have the potential to increase the
productivity of food production and profit. One of the technologies is by using geographical analysis of land resource base, to analyze suitable land area for
agricultural crops. By selecting the crop that should be planted on the area that is most suitable for that crop, it is expected the higher productivity and profitability
can be achieved. Land suitability is a function of crop requirements, climate and soilland
characteristics. Matching the land characteristics and climate with the crop requirements gives the suitability. So, suitability is a measure of how well the
qualities of a land unit match the requirements of a particular form of land use FAO, 1976. Besides all factors above; socio-economic, market and
infrastructure characteristics are the other driving forces that can influence the crop selection.
Land suitability information alone is sometimes not enough, if we want to involve in agricultural investment. Other problems will occur when one
investigated area fulfill land suitability criteria for several kinds of crops, for instance one investigated area is suitable for corn, soybean and ground peanut. To
obtain the information about which crop that will give higher profit among others, revenue cost analysis of each crop is needed and then crop, which has the higher
revenue cost ratio or the higher returns is selected in order to get higher profit.
3 Revenue cost analysis is a method of comparing alternative by analyzing the
monetary income that each alternative would generate in relation to its cost. It means that crops that have high revenue cost ratio, will give the high return.
1.2. Statement of the problem
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